Rob Reid understands copyright math because he has the compass cuts and rubber eraser burns of an experienced mathematical optimist grappling with a five-headed label hydra. "The music industry became a frustration for me on October 8, 1998," he told me, "the day that the RIAA sued Diamond Multimedia for releasing the first true mass-market MP3 player, the Rio." Pondering the late '90s, Reid noted, "Their goal was to make open MP3 players completely illegal in this country. So, assault weapons, yes; iPods, no."

Undaunted, Reid went on to found a company called Listen.com, which built the Rhapsody music service. Rhapsody became the first music service to sign all five major labels—but it took until 2002 to get the last grudging approval. The music marketplace was frustrating, as we can all remember. “By refusing to sell their music online for years, the labels gave piracy a monopoly on all of the great things that the Internet can enable for music lovers,” he told me. “This meant that hundreds of millions of people discovered music downloads through pirate services, so piracy was utterly entrenched by the time we were finally allowed to compete with it, years later.

"In embargoing their music from legal services, and greeting almost every element of today’s online music experience with lawsuits—not just MP3 players, but locker services, interactive radio services, and much more—the labels gave piracy a half-decade monopoly on awesomeness. I believe that the music industry would have something close to double its current US revenues today if it hadn’t blasted itself in the foot, shin, hip, torso, and chest by doing this.”

Instead, what the entertainment industry has right now is gall. Recent years have seen the positive growth of legit online music and videos services flanked by ever more ridiculous legislation, such as the recent repugnance known as SOPA. With those recent bad vibes in the air, I asked Reid what it was he thought TEDsters would get out of the presentation. After all, he didn’t hold back.

Reid’s optimism came through. “TED is a convivial, idea-centric environment,” he noted, "an event replete with players from all sides, all walks of life... including the warring families of LA and Silicon Valley. The key is that word 'convivial'—the SOPA brawl got quite vitriolic, which can make it hard to have a constructive conversation.”

Reid’s goal was to capture and represent some of the rhetoric from that past decade and a half in a way that would fill the hall with laughter, even if some of it came at the expense of some clearly ridiculous industry arguments. “Everyone can laugh at silly infographics,” Reid opined while silently crushing the serious journalism dreams of hacks everywhere. “And who doesn't want to deface a Leave-it-to-Beaver-like Christmas scene with pirate-and-Santa graffiti?”

It’s time to learn about Negative Employment, the crisis of ringtone piracy, and a threat on the horizon: aliens pirating music! Without further ado, here’s the talk:

Rob Reid: The $8 billion iPod

TED is an amazing event for a number of reasons, but my personal love affair with TED is centered squarely on the stage, where we see unpredictable and often eye-opening presentations. And they happen so fast.

The brilliance of Reid’s talk is that he thoroughly skewers the content industry’s dubious appeal to quantitative reasoning. We’ve all see the headlines proclaiming huge numbers of dollars, jobs, and patents lost to piracy. The appeal to quantitative measures is supposed to undermine counterarguments by doing two things: slyly stepping into a (pretend) world of objectivity, and raising the alarm with big, scary numbers. It’s hard to look at those kinds of headlines in the same way after Reid’s elegantly hilarious skewering.

Reid’s examination of Copyright Math began when he started working on his soon-to-be published debut science fiction novel, Year Zero, which Random House is publishing in early July (we’ll be reviewing it). Year Zero tells the story of how the toxic legal byproducts of some overly litigious lawyers cause problems that make global warming seem downright cozy. Not to give it away, but could you imagine how pissed off an alien music lover might get if he was sued into bankruptcy for pirating a few lousy Rick Astley songs?

In closing, I asked Reid if he thought his talk, well received as it was even by music industry lawyers at TED, signaled that the hysteria is now over. “By Hysteria I assume you’re referring to The Human League’s disappointing 1984 follow-up to their multiplatinum album Dare. I think Hysteria was over the day it hit the shelves. I’m amazed that this still interests you. Why are you asking me about The Human League anyway? Don’t know you know it’s 2012?”

Editor's Note: In asking this question, I was of course referencing Def Lepard's 1987 studio album of the same name. Clearly, Mr. Reid was a tad Euro when he was growing up.

Stay tuned, as we have more information on Reid’s upcoming work shortly.

I've been a subscriber to the TED channel on Youtube for some time, and they frequently have really amazing talks. The only complaint is for some of them I'd really like to see the 20 minute time limit raised.

On topic, yes this was an awesome skewering of the lies oft repeated by the goddamn content mafia.

In asking this question, I was of course referencing Def Lepard's 1987 studio album of the same name. Clearly, Mr. Reid was a tad Euro when he was growing up.

Def Leppard and the Human League come from the same city, so I guess you're equally Euro

Def Leppard got more traction in the States and were despised as American sell-outs for quite a long time. As far as market penetration goes, they're supposed to be much more of an American band (despite their origins).

*grabs popcorn and waits for the unquestioning copyright devotees to join us*

*scans and copies the popcorn*

You monster.... >:(

You just anihilated the corn industry. Every popcorn you scanned and copied just made 75,000$ in damages and sent 143 farmers to bankruptcy and the workers of those farms to unemployment.

I hope you're happy.

At least one variant of copyright math include reduction in popcorn sales, from reduced cinema going (never mind that people may well enjoy a bag or bowl while watching at home), and its impact on the economy via the corn farmers...

Hmmm... though as satire, it's okay, but he makes many of the same fallacious quant moves he's trying to skewer (I'm always cautious of epistemic closure -- he's preaching to the choir, and praising the already-made conclusions of his audience). And though I do not have comprehensive knowledge on the entire act, the $150k number he cites was _not_ solely for cost of damages, but arrived at as, in part, a fine, just as it doesn't cost the state if you speed but the fine is to get you to stop speeding. So I wonder what other facts he got wrong.

And I want to make clear, before people jump down my throat, that I am in no way defending the RIAA, MPAA, or any of their statements. I just don't want "the good guys" to layer on lazy thinking or BS.

This was very funny, but am I the only one who was hoping for some actual numbers, instead of just skewering the obviously made-up ones? Or at least an idea of a possible method for arriving at some actual numbers?

That is the whole point - there are no actual numbers. It's like saying that corn producers are loosing billions because people use cane/beat sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup.

If presented to congress as actual argument, that fucker would probably pass.

What do you get when you have Silicon Valley’s best and brightest sitting before you, elbow-to-elbow with Hollywood moguls, New York elite, and some incredibly cool Bostonians (along with a thousand other inspirational souls from around the world)?

This was very funny, but am I the only one who was hoping for some actual numbers, instead of just skewering the obviously made-up ones? Or at least an idea of a possible method for arriving at some actual numbers?

The trouble is, there just isn't really any plausible method of figuring out losses due to piracy. There are all kinds of reasons why people pirate stuff, but contrary to the industry's broken record assertions (no pun intended), only some of them result in revenue loss, meanwhile some are revenue neutral while others actually result in revenue gain. But without any practical way of being able to see why a person is pirating a copyrighted work, there's no way to quantify how much revenue the industry loses in any reliable way.

Copyright math, of course, will tell you that every single download equates to a lost sale. But that's copyright math which, as we know, is about as divorced from reality as Tom Cruise's ego.

Hmmm... though as satire, it's okay, but he makes many of the same fallacious quant moves he's trying to skewer (I'm always cautious of epistemic closure -- he's preaching to the choir, and praising the already-made conclusions of his audience). And though I do not have comprehensive knowledge on the entire act, the $150k number he cites was _not_ solely for cost of damages, but arrived at as, in part, a fine, just as it doesn't cost the state if you speed but the fine is to get you to stop speeding. So I wonder what other facts he got wrong.

Unless you have something to back that up, I don't think that's true. Statutory damages in copyright law are purely compensatory, not punitive; in other words, they're not fines. The idea behind setting the damages range the way it is is to give the courts a way of fairly compensating the awardee in situations where it's either impractical or impossible to calculate the actual damages.

Hmmm... though as satire, it's okay, but he makes many of the same fallacious quant moves he's trying to skewer (I'm always cautious of epistemic closure -- he's preaching to the choir, and praising the already-made conclusions of his audience). And though I do not have comprehensive knowledge on the entire act, the $150k number he cites was _not_ solely for cost of damages, but arrived at as, in part, a fine, just as it doesn't cost the state if you speed but the fine is to get you to stop speeding. So I wonder what other facts he got wrong.

Unless you have something to back that up, I don't think that's true. Statutory damages in copyright law are purely compensatory, not punitive; in other words, they're not fines. The idea behind setting the damages range the way it is is to give the courts a way of fairly compensating the awardee in situations where it's either impractical or impossible to calculate the actual damages.

You are correct that statutory damages are not technically "punitive" damages in the sense of tort law damage awards (where compensatory damages are for actual harm and punitives are available for truly reprehensible conduct as a proxy for criminal sanctions). However, statutory damages are also not truly compensatory in that they are not ever intended to compensate for an actual loss. Functionally, they are more like a fine that is paid to the injured party in lieu of actual damages rather than to the state, and in that sense, they are often drafted to serve the same general deterrent role that punitive damage awards do.

Also, not all statutory damage awards are as oppressive and draconian as the anti-piracy award. An example of a statutory damages provision that is consumer friendly would be a state statute that allows for an individual to sue a company for making fraudulent claims in an advertisement, and provides for a minimum statutory damage award of $2,000. The purpose of that law is to encourage individuals to police corporate behavior, as incentivized by the guaranteed recovery, even if the individual didn't suffer any actual harm from the fraud.

I am no scientist, but I believe an 8 billion pound iPod would impact the Earth's orbit.

ZOMG! Piracy is going to cause the earth to crash into the sun!

Not quite. The Earth's mass is ~6 x 10^24 kg. 8 billion pounds is just 2.7 x 10^9 kg, or just 0.000000000000045% of the Earth's mass. Yeah, it'll have an impact, but I don't think it'll be the primary cause of us crashing into the sun.

Isn't the sun meant to become a red giant and burn us up long before then, in any case?

[...](I'm always cautious of epistemic closure -- he's preaching to the choir, and praising the already-made conclusions of his audience).

Someone needs to re-read the article. Preaching to the choir?

Ken Fisher wrote:

What do you get when you have Silicon Valley’s best and brightest sitting before you, elbow-to-elbow with Hollywood moguls, New York elite, and some incredibly cool Bostonians (along with a thousand other inspirational souls from around the world)?

Ken Fisher / Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation.